The Modern Baker Challenge: Breads – Pain de Seigle

The next bread on my Modern Baker Challenge line-up was an absolute surprise. Pain de Seigle – aka French rye bread. It’s not that I don’t like rye – I’ve been used to eating good rye bread all my life. But for some reason, I’ve been a bit tired of rye lately. Thus I decided to make a half batch only.

Now I wish I had made the whole batch because this bread was really good! This bread is different from the other breads from the bread section in that you have to make a sponge. A 2-day bread? Yes, but it doesn’t really take much time to mix up the sponge, let it rise and put it in the fridge. The next day, you take it out of the refrigerator and mix it with the other ingredients. I didn’t really follow NM’s directions for how to mix and knead it, but just did it the BBA way. This dough was kind of wet, but I resisted the temptation to add more flour. After a 2-hour rise, I shaped the dough into a baguette, put it in my baguette pan and let it rise for another hour. Then I baked it at 375°F for about 30 minutes. The smell from the oven was divine! After 10 minutes of cooling, I sliced into it and was thrilled. Very soft crumb, a thin and crispy crust – just awesome! This recipe is a keeper!!!!!

I love the look of this and the sizes of the slices, something just really appealing about it all to me, you did a great job. You are so wonderful with all these breads…I’m with Renee, I am going to have step it up soon if I want to get a great many of them made before the deadline.

I must have done something wrong–I made this bread twice and hated it the first time and te second was so uninterested in it that I ground it for bread crumbs. I’ve been making Dan leader’s eastern european sourdough ryes this week so maybe that’s the problem? I’m turning into a sourdough snob…